A High-Wire Master Touches Down

Between his high-wire walks, Philippe Petit has been meticulously building a barnette, using 18th-century tools and methods.Credit
Phil Mansfield for The New York Times

PHILIPPE PETIT will tell you proudly that he is a “tenacious little rat.” Certainly, as he demonstrated a few weeks ago, he is an exacting guy, relentlessly curious, and thorough to the point of no return.

Rifling through his plans and manifestos for the hand-built timber mini-barn (by his hands only, and with 18th-century tools) on his property just a few miles from Woodstock, N.Y., he brandished (among other enticing particulars), elevations and axonometric drawings of joints, embellished with roman numerals, explanatory notes and poetic asides. Mr. Petit is a man who makes blueprints of his blueprints, and elevations of his elevations. Tenacious, indeed.

His “barnette,” as his partner, Kathy O’Donnell, calls the structure for its half-peaked shape and diminutive volume (though at 14 feet, the high point of its pitched roof will allow for the juggling of six hoops), is 13 years in the making, and still counting. But time is of no consequence. Mr. Petit’s opening act (still his magnum opus) — the heart-stopping, operatic and illegal walk between the tops of the World Trade Center towers in August of 1974, when he was just 24 — took six years to plan. Since then, he has walked, variously (and legally), over the Louisiana Superdome; over Amsterdam Avenue to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where he has been an artist in residence since 1982; and between the Palais de Chaillot and the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

He has also been arrested more than 500 times, mostly for street juggling; published six books, one of which, “On the High Wire” (Random House, 1985), was rejected by 27 publishers; and suffered the sudden death of his only child, his 9½-year-old daughter, Cordia Gypsy. These are the broad strokes of a lifetime shot through with always vivid “coups,” as the 57-year-old Mr. Petit would say, in between which he has been painstakingly making this barn.

Designed as a place to store his high-wire equipment and as a practice space for wire-walking in bad weather (Mr. Petit spends three hours every day limbering up, juggling and walking a steel cable stretched between two wooden X’s set on the gentle slope next to his house), the barnette also holds what he calls the “world’s smallest stage.” This is a demure, seven-by-eight-foot rectangle of maple and chestnut upon which Mr. Petit will soon perform locally the act he’s been honing for decades.

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In Philippe Petits barn-in-progress, all thats needed to make it a tiny performance space are red velvet curtains, a door and two windows. Credit
Phil Mansfield for The New York Times

“My facetious character,” he said. “This is not the Bolshoi, it’s for the kids.” His is an impish street performance of mime, juggling and pickpocketing. Maybe you’ve seen him, in a circle of chalk, palming the watches off passersby in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art or in Washington Square Park or Sheridan Square.

“I saw Philippe years before I ever met him,” said Paul Auster, who translated “On the High Wire” from French into English for Mr. Petit after running into him at a party in New York City in 1980 and hearing him half-boast, half-bemoan “that he’d been rejected by 18 publishers.” Mr. Auster then made good on a promise to find him one.

“When I was living in Paris,” Mr. Auster continued, “I used to watch him juggling on the Boulevard Montparnasse. I’d never seen anyone quite like him before. One night I was coming home quite late, it must have been 2 in the morning, and I see him — ‘the Juggler’ — walking with coils of ropes and a few people, and I thought, ‘That young man is up to something.’ Sure enough, the next day I opened the papers and saw that he’d walked between the two towers of Notre Dame. He became a kind of hero to me.”

That was in 1971. Mr. Petit was always hypnotically voluble — he might interrupt an explanation of bore augers to demonstrate a figure-eight knot, one of his favorites, or marvel at the toughness of an elegant joint like a scarf (“let me make a parenthetical,” he’ll say) — and with his springy, ginger-colored hair and urchin’s upturned nose, he still makes an impression.

In 1993, Mr. Petit and Ms. O’Donnell walked into Valerie Fanarjian’s lumber mill in Boiceville, N.Y. Ms. Fanarjian, who has seen a thing or two, rolled her eyes and thought to herself, as she explained the other day, “Great, here are two more city people here to ask dumb questions, waste my life and then buy one two-by-four.”

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Tenacious and exacting, Mr. Petit made a model of the structure, top, before beginning to build; he plans to turn the model into a lamp. A row of 18th-century gin bottles, above, form the transom over the barns side door.Credit
Phil Mansfield for The New York Times

Mr. Petit indeed pulled out a list of questions, “but they were about the tensile strength of wood in certain shapes held sideways,” said Ms. Fanarjian, who in addition to running a lumberyard is a mixed-media artist and film producer. Her latest film, “Night of the Living Jews” (“not just another Hasidic Jewish zombie movie”), wraps next month. In any case, Ms. Fanarjian is not the sort of person to be left speechless, which was what happened when Mr. Petit then took out his color-coded barn plans and handed them to her.

“Finally, I looked at him,” Ms. Fanarjian said, still dumbfounded, “and said, Who are you?”

In 1999, Ms. O’Donnell and Mr. Petit celebrated his 50th birthday with a barn-raising. Ms. O’Donnell has been planning Mr. Petit’s coups for two decades. Slyly humorous, quick witted and practical, she is “sort of” the Hillary to his Bill, Ms. Fanarjian said. “Theirs is a complicated, symbiotic relationship,” she continued. “He’s walking around looking up, wondering where to put the wire, and her thing is getting it there. Their dreams are the same, and she is the one that makes things happen.”

Though Ms. O’Donnell may seem to represent the grounded half of this pair, she admits to an inability to sit still. Mr. Petit has made her a wooden swing that hangs from a beam in the living room of their little reclaimed-timber house (a dirt driveway runs between it and the “Taj Mahal of sheds,” as Ms. Fanarjian has described the barn). Mr. Petit has outfitted the house like a boat, Joshua Slocum-style, with shelves cunningly tucked into every nook and cranny, and inventions like a little plinth for a shell caviar dish — three dowels in a piece of bluestone.

It took six years for Mr. Petit to build his tie beams and the “bents,” the skeleton of the two long halves of the barn laid one on top of the other. (And with timber, it should be noted, that’s been cut twice the size of your ordinary barn post and beams. This barn, said this reporter, is going to last you through the apocalypse. “And beyond,” averred Mr. Petit.)

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The figure-eight knot is one of Mr. Petits favorites; the iron door handle was made by Franck Rougeaud, a blacksmith near Eze, France.Credit
Phil Mansfield for The New York Times

There were 50 guests at the barn-raising, including Ms. Fanarjian, who since that first meeting has become a collaborator on Mr. Petit’s walks; Cordia Gypsy’s mother, Elaine Fasula, a painter, whose 3½-year-old son, Raimi, clutched a rope at the end of a long line of children; and the actress Debra Winger, who has been helping Mr. Petit raise money for years for a walk across the Grand Canyon (a dream of his since 1988).

To stage a coup — to stop a city, as Ms. O’Donnell has done in Paris, Frankfurt and other places — can take millions of dollars, for permitting, rigging and staging.

“It’s a high-pressure business,” Ms. O’Donnell said, “because when we’re not working we’re worrying, why aren’t we?” They bought their house and its six acres for cash in 1992. “Thank God,” she said, “so in the lean years we don’t have to worry about a mortgage. It’s feast or famine with us.”

The other day, Ms. Winger allowed as how Mr. Petit had been “a sort of muse” since long before she met him. “The metaphor of a life on the wire,” she began, “the idea of being too busy to be afraid, these are the things that spoke to me.”

“If Philippe would wear a swoosh on his T-shirt, he could walk the canyon yesterday,” she said. “If he would do a reality show. But he’s a purist, and that’s tied up in the reason he’s up on the wire. But we need this ‘uselessness.’ I find that the things that are useless in life free us in a way that nothing else can. If we forget that, we’re going to be really barren.” (Mr. Petit’s “useless” legacy was deftly expressed two weeks ago on the double cover of The New Yorker commemorating the five years since 9/11 in “Soaring Spirit” by John Mavroudis and Owen Smith, a silhouette of a wire walker and his pole walking on air high above Manhattan between ... nothing and nothing.)

Before the barn-raising, Ms. Fanarjian dipped her feet in yellow paint and made three footprints — right, left, right — on a sheet of paper, a birthday card for Mr. Petit signed by all 50 of the barn-raisers.

“The prints are yellow, because Philippe is a yellow and orange freak,” Ms. O’Donnell explained, and then gleefully pointed out that in some psychological tests a penchant for yellow indicates an unbalanced nature.